I really enjoyed the post from Sonny Gill yesterday exploring the idea of Broadcasting vs Conversing on Twitter. I think he’s on the money and new Twitter users can learn something from his suggestions – however I wanted to ask the question today:

Is it OK to use Twitter as a Broadcasting Tool?

The reason that I ask the question is that while my main Twitter account (@problogger) is pretty interactive – my secondary one (@digitalps – one connected to my photography site) is not – it’s almost purely used as a broadcasting tool.

Not only do I use it for broadcasting – I don’t follow anyone with the account and yet it still has over 1000 followers. Every day a new tweet automatically goes up on the account pointing to a new post on my blog and every day that tweet sends around 100 people to my site).

While I suspect if I were to use that Twitter account more conversationally that it could be even more effective (it is one of my goals at some point) at this point I’m relatively happy with how it’s working – particularly considering I’ve never really promoted @digitalps beyond a couple of tweets and a single post on my blog.

The other reason I ask the question today about using Twitter as a broadcasting tool is that as I look at the top 10 users of Twitter (in terms of how many people follow them) I notice that 3 of the top ten also use Twitter purely as a broadcasting tool. They have 117,025, 51,030 and 36,168 followers.

While they are either famous or have incredible reach in other ways already – they’re sustaining massive amounts of followers and never really interact with any of them (at least not publicly).

I’m not writing this post to suggest that we should all just use Twitter as a broadcast tool – but I guess I wanted to say that it can be done quite successfully – in some circumstances.

So When is it OK to use Twitter as a Broadcasting Tool?

Let me suggest a few times that ‘broadcasting’ might be appropriate on Twitter:

1. When users know what they’re getting – what strikes me about each of the examples that I’ve used above is that each account has not been used as an interactive tool at any point in it’s history (or at least in my memory of them). When people sign up as followers of these accounts they can clearly see by the archives of tweets from the account that there is no interaction. They know what they’re getting (ie that this is a ‘broadcasting type twitter account) when they sign up and opt into receiving those tweets.

When ‘broadcasting’ becomes dangerous is when you change the rules on your followers and go from using Twitter purely as a conversational tool to using it purely as a broadcasting one.

2. When you’ve got something worthwhile to broadcast – a Twitter account used solely for broadcasting will be increasingly attractive to followers as the quality of the broadcasts increase.

I actually have followers of my photography twitter account thank me all the time for my tweets – because they help them improve their photography. If the tweets were rubbish it’d fail to be useful to people and they’d stop following.

3. When you focus upon a topic/niche – ‘niche’ might not be the right word here but in each of the broadcast examples that I’ve given there is a definite ‘focus’ of what the broadcasted tweets will be about. Barack Obamas tweets are about him and what he and his campaign team are doing, CNN’s account is used for breaking news stories, MacRumors uses theirs to talk about Apple news and my photogrpahy tweets are all obviously about photography.

I guess this taps into points #1 and #2 – users sign up because they have an interest in a specific topic and as long as the tweets are on topic and useful – they don’t mind the lack of interactivity.

4. When you mix it up – of the 7 top users of Twitter that don’t use Twitter purely as a broadcasting tool it is interesting to note that most of them DO use Twitter to ‘broadcast’ from time to time. They tweet their own links, point people to their own projects etc on a semi-regular basis – but it’s not overwhelming.

I find on my @problogger Twitter account that I get very positive feedback from people when links to my own posts go up on the account. What I find though is that my followers are much more open to seeing my links if I’m also posting other interesting links and mixing up my tweets with other interactions (replies to others, tweets about my day, reflections on topics that I’m interested in etc). The more variety I inject into my tweets the more positive feedback I get and the more people seem to click on my own broadcast style tweets.

What Do You Think?

Please don’t get me wrong – I love Twitter most when it is used conversationally, when people truly connect and where it’s used relationally. However I’m not sure it always needs to be used in this way and actually love to see people using it in a variety of ways also.

I’m interested to hear how you use Twitter. Do you ‘broadcast’, ‘converse’ do both or perhaps use Twitter in a completely different way?

I’d also love to see examples of some of the most effective uses of Twitter that you’ve seen.

I’m looking forward to your comments!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



When is Broadcasting OK on Twitter?